deliv perpet 1-4

i. bitter

It is one.
Humanity is transcendentalistic, that is my first postulate, and it is on this idea this book is based.

One refers to truth, that blue quest. I say one because the opposite of truth is false, and of that there is many, the many ires of lies thrust into many hearts by the infinite sea of tongues clad in iron ore.

If we seek this elusive truth, we must first define it. Furthermore, we must ask, is this possible? Because we are no longer in the age of the Renaissance, wherein a great mind like DaVinci can discover without deviance the world for himself, our pursuit becomes questionable. In this era even the greatest thinker cannot be held accountable for more than a smittance, a fraction of a percent of this human’s field, with the exception of philosophy, which, today, as in ancient times, is the impression of a single man or a group of us upon the world seen by those eyes. And so every man must learn to depend on the eyes of others for his knowledge of the world, and what is to guarantee that authenticity? We are all familiar with the oceans of deception flooding to our doorstep, so how is one to trust others for the most intimate of personal discovery? Each person has his own truth, and, as believed Emerson and Thoreau, that truth is what suits that person and nothing but.

As we are on the cusp of the following millennium, an individual’s contribution is further shadowed and washed by the unerring tides of the masses and drones of information generated by the Collective, and flooded with vast archives of electronica. The only remaining way to be known outside one’s circle is to become the leader of increasing masses of people in a superpower, through the devotion of a life, or to establish unique maxims unclaimed by others and find a following or acclaim in this way, which is unfortunately becoming close to impossible as the fountain of new ideas becomes parched. Arakawa once compared humans to aphids which must not meddle with anything above their caste. It falls.

Shall we move just for now to religion? What can be said of this ritual? Sri Ramakrishna once said, "Allah is one and he has a thousand faces." If one favors the viewpoint of the existence of a deity, then one shall not repress the gods of others. The prejudiced man, one of hate, is one without wisdom, honor or intelligence.
What shall it be then? The question of the existence of this "super being" has been with us for the history of our civilization, and, well, a human lifetime is simply not enough time to solve it.


ii. Sweet

A coincidence. A being that lives for a picosecond, and some not that, for a hundredth of a femtosecond, the realm of the top quark and humble boson. Or maybe not at all, a thin sheet of rice paper afloat on the surface of an unknown river. A coincidence really does not exist. It is the creation of a human mind, a grain of sand that simply should not be there. Its vocation is to stimulate the participle of our brain dedicated to irony, oddity, and the belief that the world is random.
"Random" comes in two distinct flavors—pleasant randomness, a portion of the truth with the disturbing repetition and pattern removed, and the true random , wherein patterns are as present as absent. This is the origin of the coincidence. The false random is but a superset of such. It is the nursery of rhyme and pattern, mathematics, and logic from chaos. Even fractals live on this street.
In this reality, it is not unconceivable to find a perfect picture formed by chance on a staticky cathode ray tube, however likely, or unlikely, for this has an equal chance of happening as any other frame of static. But it doesn’t happen.

As we are on the cusp of the following millennium, an individual’s contribution is further shadowed and washed by the unerring tides of the masses and drones of information generated by the Collective, and flooded with vast archives of electronica. The only remaining way to be known outside one’s circle is to become the leader of increasing masses of people in a superpower, through the devotion of a life, or to establish unique maxims unclaimed by others and find a following or acclaim in this way, which is unfortunately becoming close to impossible as the fountain of new ideas becomes parched. Arakawa once compared humans to aphids which must not meddle with anything above their caste. It falls.

Shall we move just for now to religion? What can be said of this ritual? Sri Ramakrishna once said, "Allah is one and he has a thousand faces." If one favors the viewpoint of the existence of a deity, then one shall not repress the gods of others. The prejudiced man, one of hate, is one without wisdom, honor or intelligence.
What shall it be then? The question of the existence of this "super being" has been with us for the history of our civilization, and, well, a human lifetime is simply not enough time to solve it.


Bitter and Sour are named for life, that which some so eloquently refer to in the expression, "Life's a bitch and then you die." I try to never feel those seven words, instead, to attach to them the positive essence that number represents to so many.
I think the small favor I can do for the reader is to give an explanation as to why this book is titled as it is. "Delivery" represents the movement forward from the term "Deliverance", used by Dante and Milton to represent that day which holds great importance to me - that day when nothing matters, when a man's value is not weighed on his mistakes, of which I have many, but on his internal fire's radiance to the world without. I realize "without" is a grammatical error in regards to word choice - I'd fail the SAT if I marked that, but I'll use it anyway. This book is my thoughts, and although I write about the world, I will do my very best to retain the purity of the thought, and include some bit of cadence. Perhaps I won't bore the hell out of you. Perhaps.

Travis nods. His hair afire under the blacklight, his eyes are unfocused and his face fronting the candle, nearly unconsciously he wraps and unwraps a single Everlast strap onto his left hand.

Laura stares back across the candleflame into his empty eyes, vessels of moisture, filled with bees of yellow, waxy light. Travis does not move. Laura tucks her hair behind her ear, resettles in the big leather chair, and looks back at him. It is silent, save for the sound of candlelight hitting their features.

It was a weekday, a Tuesday night in fact, and his nose twitches, filled with her perfume. Finally, he flicks a cashew into his mouth, attempting to look smooth, and speaks:

"So, what did Kelley say?"

Laura runs her fingertip over the candleflame, slides it sensuously but casually into her mouth, and replies, "Why are you so interested in her anyway?" He looks up, and lets out a puff of air that one may faintly perceive as a laugh.

"I’m attracted to her, isn’t it obvious? I mean, she’s a goddess." Laura laughs. "Hey, at least I'm honest, right? I deserve some party points for that!" he retorts with a smile. His cargo pants anchor the scene, as the candle burns in slow motion, stuttering frame-by-frame. I feel like that, only put out, he thinks to himself.

It started raining again, but here, I suppose it always does. One is not to expect abnormality. I’m sure as hell not going anywhere for a while, he thinks. The red clay road has probably disintegrated under the torrent of water brought by Hurricane Clarice, and I must wait.

He understands the importance of daintily skipping over this girl, she isn’t healthy for his emotional state. Then again, neither is alcohol, or caffeine, and those must stay, at least for now. She nibbles on an aloe leaf. The spines bite into her nerves, but her complexion is unfazed. His eyes are elsewhere, and she’s trying to figure it out. He is fixed, anchored, somewhere in France, in the south, where the air is heavy with heat, in the hands of some woman he knew once, eating foie gras and drinking a Grand Cru Classe from the C?te de Nuits. His mind falls.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, under God, with liberty and justice for all.

His fingertips are still aglow. The sun is licking the horizon and he lets out a half-hearted yawn. The morning has come, to take him away, yanking him by the forearms, out the door and into his car, slamming the door rudely behind him. Doesn’t morning have manners?

It’s still dark outside, and he’s already missed. Morning is an idiot, someone should stomp it into the ground.

de-con-struc-tion n (1973) : the belief that a work does not mean anything. A method of criticism that assumes language refers only to itself rather than to an extratextual reality, that asserts multiple conflicting interpretations of a text, and that bases such interpretations on the philosophical, political, or social implications of the use of language in the text rather than on the author’s intention.

What happens if we deconstruct the Arabic numeral? In reality, it is but a stroke out of a pen, a bit of darker ink on a lighter background. An extra stroke separates a rich man from a poor one, sees entire lives born and lived. The literal difference between 6 and 60 is but a squiggle, save the former is a life began, the latter one lived.

The blacklight is still aglow. Travis checks his watch, but the ultraviolet radiation doesn’t make it through the crystalline face of his watch. It glows uniformly dark purple, as if the light had swallowed time and set its own order. Under the blacklight, time stands still.


Scientists concerning themselves with quantum physics follow the work of Schr?dinger. For those not acquainted with his Cat, I will recount...

Schr?dinger’s argument, reduced to its simplest terms, is that something does not exist until observed. He brings forth the example of a cat, sealed in a box, and sent off to space. In this box, scientists have placed a single cesium atom, and next to it a radiation detector wired to a pouch of cyanide gas. The atom has a fifty–percent chance of decaying, at which point it will emit an alpha particle, which will trigger the radiation detector. Subsequently, the detector will release the cyanide gas, killing the cat. The scientists on Earth are completely unaware of the condition of the cat.

Schr?dinger states that the cat does not exist until its state is known (he derives this from quantum behaviors of various elementary particles). If the box has a transmitter, and a scientist on Earth is notified of the cat’s state, then the cat pops into existence at that point of the chain. When that scientist tells another, the cat begins to exist for them both.

To Travis, time does not exist. Think of how many people are looking at a watch, creating time, every instant! A million births, turned deaths when one’s mind is focused away from keeping time, ticking in one’s head. A death. I do not know what follows life, what it’s like not to live, how to listen to silence and breathe one’s own blood. To fight decay.

The tips of the sun’s shaggy hair begin to flop over the horizon. Travis left, and Laura is still asleep in the rapidly lighting room. The sun now must exercise caution so as not to wake her, and tiptoes around her, leaving the shadow of her body unlit. She is seen by reflected light only, as a void amongst the saturated air. The clouds form a queue behind the sun; everyone wants a look.


Laura feels the warm trickle of blood dripping down her temples, twitching in nightmare. Finally, the sun wins and she is left, her vision overwhelmed by the natal, rouge underside of her eyelids. It is the feeling of flying too fast through a forest, the leaves blurry around you, and suddenly being slowed to a crawl. She opens her eyes, her mind empty with clarity, her senses flooded, and yawns. What a bad trip, she thinks. There is a bit of crust in the corners of her mouth, and the candle lies, or is it exists, eroded to a sad, tearful blob on the table. The glass is dull with candlewax. To see one must look. Two by two, Laura marches her thoughts through the railway tunnel.

I think today I will disown the slash. I like the period conciderably more, and the slash is visually harsh and confusing. It shall be so.


chpt2

A silver tortoise. The day flashes by, like lightning, or perhaps like the quick scene changes theaters achieve with creative lightning. The same house is now host to the family which owns it.

To own something - a basic perception, but intricate, able to vex one's hopes, failures, and is the seperation between a loser and a winner, the cosmic scale of success. That should be in the dictionary, not the esoteric scholarly chant there, telling nothing of the blood intermixed into the quest for property. The framers of the Constitution realized this, and needless to say inquire into how long it has lasted us. "Mine" perhaps was amongst the first hominid mutterings.

The family smiles, and is happy. The happiness was false. Is false. The daughter is seated in the corner, and is listening to the underwater murmurings emanating from her parents' mouths, for she is not there. Her soul is awake, running the paths in the gardens, fleeing from her boyfriend, but now her face is a frown. Lost joy, once again, the man mutters.
"Mark," she mumbles, just audibly.
"Who?" her mother replies.
Her parents continue chewing, mechanically, the typical Christian dinner. The phone rings. It is me, and I am in the hope that her parents are not home, but that smittance of aspiration is shattered almost as quickly as it is created.

"Hello?" her mother croaks. She is irritated today, as always.

"Yes, can I speak to Morissa please?" I answer, attempting to be polite.

"Well, Morissa is 15, and she does not date," her mother replies. How vitriolic she is.

"I'm from her school (I lied), and I'm just calling to ask about our math homework."


Okay, but Morissa does not date. She is 15," her mother reiterates. How naive she is. Sad. "We cannot allow her to date until she is 16. She's eating. Can she call you back?"

These are the same people that label a trash can "Historic Jonesboro", call blowing your nose "relieving one's sinuses" and cheer for their soccer team with restrained golf-course clapping. Artificiallity is the sin of hypocrites, but this facelessness and prurience is the pathetic people's sole refuge. Nonetheless, these people escape the wrath of God, as far as they know it, by living as unexiting and safe a life as possible, so as they remain out of harm's way regardless of whether God exists. Self-reaffirming delusions.

I am agnostic, and my outlook leaves many questions to be answered. Some people do not believe in God as a physical being, but still believe in a supernatural entity, a type of light-ferrous aether with morals that watches over and mediates the world away from anarchy and destruction. The common good, a fantasy concieved at the hands of madmen, by Marx and Negel, and executed by the tyrants Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky. When they are held at the gates of Judgement by the flaming angel (I speak metaphorically), will their sheepish excuse be, "Oh, we were trying to make it better for all of the people"? "My dog ate my homework" sounds more convincing.


Nathan is home, in his office, in front of the wall of televisions he uses to telecommute. He is seated at a large oak table, his face illuminated by a single lamp dating from the 1930s, and the voodoo doll he brought home from Papua New Guinea casts a devilish shadow across the smooth, polished surface of the oak. The wall is flickering, faintly, awash in the throes of video noise. He does not move, staring blankly into the swirling gray, looking for the answer to it all. He is prone to blank stares. On his desk, as well, lies a sharp paring knife he brought from the kitchen, and a Tupperware bowl of water. Several of the fingers on his left hand float in the bowl, and his right hand fondles the knife. What power the concept of choice lends one, the power to give as a gift one's body, to the cosmos. It is unimaginable, the quantity of energy that could be extricated were his entire mass converted to such. Einstein's celebrated formula gives enough energy from this poor corpse to power a civilization. If only to burn it in the core of our sun.

To captivate one's audience is man's greatest goal, a symbol of power, and when you speak, write, or act, make your words rumble. I wish you thunder. Nathan was almost there, half a step from this goal. Almost.

Today. January 24th, 1999. I stare outside the brisk gray window, awash with muddy reflections and the multiple images of streetlights, just flickering on, signalling the beginning of dusk. My eyes are unfocused, or should I say focused, somewhere between the reflections and the snowflakes on the other side of that window. I feel alone. It is not my call, but snow decides
to fall anyway. Through my daze, I begin to see, if one can call it that, shadows moving amongst the snow-covered sidewalk, confusing the pristine atmosphere inside my apartment, which is now lit up with sulfuric incandescence and humming with the associated buzz. Thoughts begin to fill my mind - these souls, saving for tomorrow, scurrying and collecting their property into a pile, and protectively hovering over it. What is to force them to think that they have time ahead of them? Perhaps, their savings are better spent, turned into concrete objects, lest they lose it most, or it all, for today is the day of Deliverance, when we shall stand, one by one, under the Great Spotlight, at the scrutiny of nine shaggy demons, the rejection counter. The lines of souls awaiting deliverance from this place to the other stretches into the fog at the horizon, a self-proclaimed road of uncertainty.

Today. January 25th, 1999. All is well. No rogue comet has smashed our crystalline world, no plague has swept the seas, no nuclear arsenal has been discharged. Don't people have the right to be wrong? Maybe they were off, by two probably, we're willing to place our bets that Deliverance is tomorrow. We must fear the torrent of the next day, crouching under our desks and unattentive to the opportune yells of "duck and cover!"


I see the man sitting on the curb outside Starbucks. He is wearing a big jacket, fleece I assume, and, quite prominently, a large cross made from copper tubing and junction pieces, hanging from his neck by a chain that was at one point the chain inside a toilet. Some respect he has, but, upon further thought, he is the walking manifestation of morality. I see it now, his statement is that lavishness and greed should not mix with righteousness and faith - that a cross from gold is but a hypocritical foil for an unexistent evil.


He sips some coffee, and glances over in my direction, quite casually, despite the effects of the caffeine: I can already see his foot tapping. I try to look down at the passenger's seat, where arrayed I have several sticks of incense and some cassette tapes, perhaps to create the illusion that I'm just looking for something in my car and not following him around. I am not really following, happenstance threw him into my world, but he does not know that. I swipe my hand across my nose and look into my rearview mirror, then at the man. He turns away from me, mutters something, and walks away. Carefully. Does he know?

3.
A cold air wanes. I feel the incessant breath of the air vent over my head. It fills the room and my mind with a watery, flat C. Resonating between my eardrum and middle ear bone, I feel it pressing on my neck and chest. Staring upwards at the not-so-dark winter sky, dark, ominous and slender as the fingers of a child, branches invade my colourspace and find themselves illuminated by a bright, ochre beam of Greek light-aether eminating from our lantern, which, in haste, someone forgot to turn off. My deepest, guttoral fear is that someone will affix their finger on the switch and press, that their cyrillic fingers will revive the light overhead, and shatter the fluidity of the Moment which Escapes Time.
I struggle to raise my neck to peer at the haunting crimson segments of the table-clock, burning past my retinas and invoking a dull but evident fear in the area zoned to Heavy Primitive of my brain. Easing my neck muscles' pulsations, I lie back down, not feeling the bristles of carpet on my forearms.

When the light refracts within my cornea, I notice that the clock also casts its ill glow onto my shin. After I walk through the room, a sense of vacuum trailing and tugging on my shoulder blades, I feel the breath of the air-conditioner transfer its cool to the droplets of water on my face, doubtlessly inflicted on my skin, which I can not feel, by the splash of water at the nearby sink. Christmas lights shed their alien sounds and transfix my gaze as I stop.

A clarity not felt for many months swept over my awareness, not unlike the cold blue autumn breeze that is but another reminder of the impending sunset. Walking in the cold night often has a salving effect on our hectic lives. All of the horrid nights spent on the border between sleep and consciousness which took their toll on my brain and my eyes' ablilty to focus had washed away, as if by a coating, soothing sheet of ocean water under a full moon's cobalt glow. It casts a cool blue shadow, bordering on green, behind a lone couple walking on the beach near three Japanese lanterns, set afire by the radiant flame of the candles within.

My state of being crashes and is brought to an abrupt halt by the not-quite-square cube-gone-bald, rectangularish silhouette of my computer's screen, flashing over my gallery of thought. Like milk that doesn't quite make itself unknown with the first rinse, my fresh eyes still sting frightening words on the surface of the glass. The backwards reflection of the screen laughs and jeers at my inability to bring it into focus. Download compete. Its sister indicates to me that my meditation consumed so much time that I no longer have a mindless existence staring at the progress bar crawling ever closer to the plastic rim of my monitor. A long-lost melody from hours ago entered my newly-washed consciousness and, in the middle of this December night, soiled it with the sounds of “Daytime”.

The judgement that would normally take at least a fraction of a second now happens too quickly to notice: I must now reboot. After I move my hands which are lighter than the thick, odorless air in my office, the computer responds. The classic startup sound replaces all other emotions and thoughts in my brain, if just for a second, and I feel a dense nirvana, probably like an acid trip, I imagine. That's probably what it's like, I think to myself. I haven't tried it but maybe my postitulates have some factual basis. Heretic? I hope not.

Tail lights stream down my driveway, red sprites flinging their masses across my field of vision. Dinner, my legs think, while from my neck up continues processing the sweet melodies of a city far away. Lyon's fair night, I think of, the wafting melodies drifting upward from the city's people and scurring orchestras, fighting for cherished spaces in the squares, as I listen from my canary's perch room atop the mountain that we scaled earlier that day. The slipping gradient catches my attention: the city's curtains are draped all around it, and although just above it is a pitch-black starry sky, the city itself is a pool of light, projected by an invisible spotlight. Views from outside always amaze me; how the Milky Way must look and how the sounds of an entire galaxy must play with one's mentality from just outside the stream of stars.

Now, I am sentenced to the peonic task of mechanically chewing food that I personally had introduced to the notion of microwaves two minutes ago. Damn, I need to play the scribe and record my previous emotions, or they shall be lost forever. The chair creaks, I take paper from a kitchen drawer, and then I find a single black Bic pen and sit back down. After pulling the chair towards myself once more, it exhales a sigh and I try to recall what indescribable feelings had fallen through my mind just before. I try to filter those sensations from the pungent odor of the food inches from my nose, and trap the vocallizations of other members of the family into my magic disposable filter.

I have finished eating, and I washed my plate without thinking, despite the alleged clarity my mind has harvested from the air-conditioner. Now I must retype these thoughts, so as to transfer them onto a more permanent medium: magnetic disk. Here, in my office agian, red Christmas lights which I placed on a remote table paralyze me, and I try to use the "Don't look down" theory to defeat my not-quite-so-invisible foe. Actually, I'm not that good at fighting inanimate objects much scarier than I. Help...

4.
The chapters end with a question. A plea, on occasion, but always a condition of instability, of discomfort, of inquisitive iced tea. Never, never ever a plane, always a knawed-off and gnarled knot in the wood, an anchor to one's mind. Technology is sich (sic). The humble anchor, an item which is simply not open to refinement, recieves a high-tech makeover, courtesy of Lockheed. It reads like something out of a historical text, and the statement generally holds true that a civilization with sufficient time whereas some may be dedicated towards the redefinition of that which does not need to be redefined, a civilization which amassed plentiful time to design new anchors, is a civilization with too much time altogether. Whose prime citizens spend the year's pay of workers in developing nations on a miniscule component, a nut or perhaps a buckle, in increasingly more complex and expensive transportation boxes (fashioned by this Civilization as Automobiles), on devices which make pictures, on a strand which applies pressure and weight to someone's neck, a gold necklace, or perhaps on some children's toy that may outlast the moment and survive as the cenosure for but a pittance of the time spent to convert labor to money to manufactured goods. It is pitied, by some, by few, by none.
Phillip is over. Their shoes lie scattered beneath the table, and they are consumed by laughter as they vie for the better of two chairs in front of the computer. They fight over nearly everything, the pizza is almost here and they haven't even begun a game of Quake. Productivity seems to shy away from

weekends. The room is filled with the ringings of ska, and their laughter elevates to screams. Travis is first to calm down, and finally manages an intelligible comment:
"Man, I gotta throw it to ya, this is one helluva good way to forget about that bitch that dumped me, she didn't deserve me anyway. What a skank, I can't believe I was foolish enough to go out with her." He glances at Phillip, and siezes the opportunity to throw him out of the better chair. There is a knock at the door, and they abandon the illuminated screen under the constant hail of charged, angry particles. Tripping over their oversized pants, they somehow manage the stairs and count the delivery man out the money, panting and sniffing anxiously in the general direction of the two pizza boxes. Their reflexes dulled by the marijuana, they stumble up the stairs and attack the pizza.

These two young men are in the throes of spawning a company, fueled by the dream of making it big, but how comical and foolish their efforts appear, their moods overflowing with artificial euphoria.
"Ok man, we gotta get serious. Who's gonna be our CEO? Is it gonna be me, or you,"Travis inquires.
"Dude, we can both be the CEOs. Ever heard of dual executive management?" Phillip is hard to understand, he is in the midst of finishing the crust of his first slice of pizza.
"Man, screw this business crap. Let's take a few more hits and play Quake. I'm up first," Travis replies, with dissatisfaction. And so it is, every weekend. Maybe, someday, when the hormones kick out and the harsh reality of poverty kicks in, maybe then they will make their millions, but for now they are addicted to spending time with other people.
From a purely cynical perspective, it is unapparent what a human being gains from casual, bland, and meaningless interaction with other humans. Oddly, the most difficult things to explain in our world are the simplest, most unscientific, and most common imaginable. Perhaps there is mystique in conformity. Or, from another vantagepoint, the mystique lies in the individual discoveries undertaken by every person, the game to discover life we all play. Is the game specifically designed to baffle us? There are the brightest stars, the ones that burn beyond supernova, who question the game itself. They have leaped out of the stellar cycle and have freed themselves of the prison of consciousness.
Travis was, is, one of these great minds in disguise. He was never amongst the popular, and he set out to change his standing in the eyes of others. The lines of maturity and popularity are inverse on the graph of age, and by the time that Travis had won the respect of all his peers and was known as "cool", his peers had become mature enough to become free of the dependence on popularity, and suddenly, one's knowledge held more value than one's clothes or friends. He was caught in a trap, as usual, and now sits in the pit of

mediocrity. Perhaps it was his generation's obsession with creativity, or artificial creativity, that spawned his microrevolution, but that revolution went on under his nose, and he did not know it. He was always absent-minded. Is.
He simply does not match. His Leonardo Da Vinci shirt is the enemy of the accompanying cargo pants taken from ska culture, and although he has mastered both the discipline of knowledge and the discipline of favor, the first should take preeminence. Being balanced may be good now, but what employer will care how many friends he had? The people, the adult people, in his environment all hope he will snap out of it, but, why bother? He's the one that will make his millions and laugh, isn't that how it goes?

I blink, my eyes dazed and my skin buffeted by the cool gusts blowing through the nighttime field. I am flooded with the brilliant, pure white of a spotlight. Such pure, bright light is uncommon, it reminds me of the other times, the others, the absence of control I feel now - the operating table, the fall from the top of the hill some call Consciousness, the dizzy sensation of doctors feeding you ether. I will always remember the echoes stuck behind human forms, my brain in the throes of punching out. Or of waking from the blackout, to see the altimeter reading seventeen-triple-oh, and the attitude screaming for negative 90 degrees. I am still in the state of waking, wanting to stretch, but thrown into the immediacy of that little speaker gently purring "Altitude, altitude! Altitude, altitude!" I should just pass out, say forget it all, but "should" is a deceptive expression, "want" would work better. It is becoming progressively more difficult to retain a clear mind.

The man turns the page, and I am sitting, slouching, in a hard orange plastic chair designed by the Devil himself. I am yawning, and the blurry speaker slides the transparency down the overhead projector. My auditory sense is filled with, no, barely touched by, the sound of the overhead fan and the muffled coughing of several students. I know where I am, this is high school, and this is hell. I learn nothing - I read books, teach myself, learn the great thinkers, breathe philosophy. I do not know why I go to organized education. My ideas are repressed, not appreciated. They do not care that I have been enlightened, my voyage of discovery submerged below the banality of syllabi and three ring binders. I run my tounge across my teeth, I feel metal. I am tired, and I fall back asleep. Blink...blink...stop.